Mike's "How many modellers in the UK ?" thread got me thinking ( yes once in a while the old brain does spring into life ).
What would you like made available 'off the shelf' for model railway enthusiasts ?
For me it would be one of those pump handcars
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and some animated track workers / passengers.
I have seen the Lionel one from the animated film The Polar Express but never a 'OO' one.
We visited a show last year were they had a layout with animated workmen. A chap fixing a signal was one another was chopping wood. All done with cams & rods.
There's still no RTR model of the Fowler/Stanier 2-6-2t or Stanier 2-6-0 let alone novelty items.
I also think there'll be a shift away from RTR to kit and scratch building as the great depression takes a hold except at the very top end of the market.
There are whole swathes of locomotives which have not yet been released, including some NRM prototypes such as LNER (Ex-NER) J27 0-6-0 & Q6 0-8-0, whilst a G5 0-4-4T would be a very welcome addition to my stud, so there's no *need* for novelty items in this hobby.
Have you seen the price of kits these days? It's far more expensive to build a 4mm loco from a kit than to buy a similar ready-to-run model.
This would be very hard to do in anything smaller than G1, because of the need to fit a very small motor somewhere. In 0 or S, you could possibly use fishing line to pull the model, and have a free-wheeling mechanism, but you probably wouldn't be able to get that to work in
> We visited a show last year were they had a layout with animated
There was an article in RM in the late 90s about animated figures in
7mm scale, and that referrred to some commercial moving figures in 4mm scale. I believe the title was "Moving Features for /Arcadia/", BICBW.
I have seen one on video: the footage was of the Exeter St. Davids railfair in 1994, and IIRC it wsa from "Prtarit of a Region: the South West", by Bob Symes-Shutzman.
I vaugely recall seeing one at a preserved railway somewhere, probably Ropley on the Mid-Hants Railway.
The book Industrial Modelling by the chap that made the narrow gaunge sand works and the Victorian dock complex (sorry it's 0500 and I'm knackered) describes how to make swans swim, how to have a little girl skipping with feet leaving the floor and several other bits and pieces - Reminds me of a thread a year or so back on working shunting horses.
I would be very impressed by a skipping child in any scale, since the rope would need to be turned by something. The jumping could be handled by attaching the hands to tight loops of fishing line, and hiding the top in scenery, with the whole thing hoisted up and down.
The most interesting working feature I have seen on a model woul dhave to be a working reverser on some 0 gauge Walscharts valve gear, which used memory wire to operate. I don't think I have ever seen this before, and it was quite subtle, but it was quite effective as it was used on a shunter on a small yard layout.
I think the first working horse was done using electromagents and high voltages, adn was done specifically to wind up an author (IIRC David Jenkinson), who had mentioned that he meant to put in the introduction to a new book that he had never seen a working model horse, and was first revealed to th epublic at the show where the book launched.
I have seen a Douglas horse tram in G, operated by track power and using an electric carving knife to operate the horse, which looked good from a distance while moving, but which could leave the horse in a very strange position when stationary. The legs were fixed, but the whole horse moved.
The skipping rope was wire bent into a U shape, passing through holes in the child's hands as weighted feet kept her upright. She stood by a wall, through which the end of the wire was passes to a set of gears to rotate and raise and lower it (never saw the detail on that one). Leighton Buzzard was the sand works, featured swans swanning about in the river, floating with a magnet keel following a magnet on a chain in the base of the river (canal? it had a lock). Cant find the book, sorry.
I think the skipping rope was in Dave Rowe's first diorama layout, based on Dylan Thomas town of Llareggyb (Bugger all backwards, the Welsh pronounce a y like a u and vice versa) in Under Milk Wood.
He also did a man leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette. This used a length of fibre optic fibre with a rotating disk in front of a red light inside the building to give the variable glow as he inhaled and exhaled.
It's the "novelty items" that can make a layout for me. I have found a few animated items that are available :-
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Not to everyones taste I know but they do add a little more interest and fun.
On the layout we saw with the animated figures the chap had built them himself and I thought at the time the precision and skill needed to drill out the paths for the rods within the figures.
From the days before the Faller system, I remember seeing moving road vehicles driven by magnets in a channel under the road surface. One was at an outdoor miniature village in something like G scale, another was a smaller-scale model of a new motorway interchange. The first time I saw a Faller HO roadway system on a Swiss mountain railway layout, I was very impressed.
Matchbox motorised Motorway. I remember it but darned if I can remember which of my friends had one. ISTR that we stretched the springs on his by attaching things that were not Matchbox,plastic ducks ,his mothers favourite shoes the family cat via a bit of fishing line and its collar. Did it no good at all, the toy that is, the cat survived. Idly I searched Ebay and there are a couple in various states on there but the prices would suggest there is little interest in them..
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